


Lilacs

by aderyn



Series: Natural Facts [31]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221b, Post-Reichenbach, Reunion, blossoms & rue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:15:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>April: maybe not the cruellest month, but close.</p>
<p>Exile hasn’t made him a romantic. The clocks are still precise.  The knives are still sharp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lilacs

April: maybe not the cruellest month, but close.

London, and John, are studies in want. An instinct which will take him back, finally, to his nesting grounds.  His migrations fan out from 221B, and he’s been so treed, so war-like, and now...he’s tired.  And all the germs in the earth are alive again.

And all the spiders are dead.

Exile hasn’t made him a romantic. The clocks are still precise.  The knives are still sharp.  (But of the grand, archaic emotions _\--_ wrath and melancholy and rue and woe, the most dangerous of disadvantages--he has perhaps a better understanding.)

They met in the dead of winter. It’s spring now, again, the wheel of the year turned more than once since he left. He doesn’t know whether he cried when he did; he just wanted to be gone, so he could grieve and grow back, and he knows, with the kind of certainty that he knows just about everything, that nothing will ever grieve him that much again unless it’s that they aren’t meant to always...

An offering:

Bunch of lilacs? (No.) Handcuffs? (No.) Contrite expression? (Yes.)  The things that he’ll carry, when the door opens.  His arms should be full. But of what? ( _Of you_.)

Exile hasn’t made him a romantic, no, but

April: the month of migrations, and blooms.

**Author's Note:**

> For the romantics, and the T.S. Eliot fans. ( : 
> 
> “APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding  
> Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
> Memory and desire, stirring  
> Dull roots with spring rain....” 
> 
> “Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not  
> Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither  
> Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  
> Looking into the heart of light, the silence...” 
> 
> “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,  
> Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” –The Waste Land


End file.
